


cracks in everything

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Apocalypse, Basira Hussein - Freeform, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, ambiguous ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:21:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24117916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: That's how the light gets in.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 14
Kudos: 80





	cracks in everything

The Fears cannot be destroyed, and the place they came from is gone. But they can be cast out. Jon Knows they can. 

There’s a crack in the basement of Hilltop Road.   
  
Jon Saw before they fought their way here that the crack in reality leads to other worlds. He Saw that one of those worlds is empty, and if they banished the Fears there, they would die without humans to feed on. They could finally be safe. They could finally rest. This is why Daisy is dead on the tile floor of the kitchen upstairs, and Basira is holding herself together with both hands, barely able to stand. This is why Martin is shaking at Jon’s side, his hand clenched tight around Jon’s.   
  
“Please, Martin,” Jon begs, his voice cracking. “I can’t hold her off forever.”   
  
They’re too late, is the thing.   
  
Thousands of spiders are chittering in the shadows, some of them tiny and some as big as dogs, all of them hungry, only kept at bay by the red lamp of Jon’s Gaze. Anabelle broke the wheel, and the slowly opening crack before them leads to only one world. Anya Villette’s world. 

The choice before them isn’t whether they can defeat the Fears, but whether they’re willing to trade one world for another. One London for another. There are seven billion people in the other world, and no Archivist; there never was, in that London. There will be nothing stopping Annabelle Cane from leading the Fears through other cracks in the world, the Mother of Puppets beginning an endless parade of conquest through dimensions, ceaselessly devouring as she goes.   
  
It’s not really a choice.   
  
“I’m not leaving you,” Martin says through what Jon Knows is blind fear, his grip painfully tight on Jon’s hand. He’s already figured out that Jon can’t go through. “Don’t you dare try and make me.”   
  
“I am,” Basira says, with a bitten-off noise of pain. “God help me, but I don’t want to die.”   
  
“Go,” Jon says, not looking away from the spiders. “She lives in her first flat on Thomas Street. She isn’t a detective, and she’s never met you.”   
  
“Jesus,” Basira says, and sways on her feet. There’s only a thirty percent chance that she’ll live long enough to find Daisy again. She might just bleed out in the basement of a different Hilltop Road. “Thank you, Jon. And--I’m sorry.”   
  
“Me too,” Jon says tightly. “Please. Go.”   
  
Basira goes. He can’t turn to look at her, but he still Sees what happens: she puts her arm into the light spilling out of the crack, cries out, and then she’s gone.   
  
“Martin,” he says again, his head aching so badly he wants to cry. “I have to close the door. _Please_.”   
  
“I’m not leaving you,” Martin says again. He’s still shaking.   
  
“I don’t want to watch you suffer,” Jon whispers against the pain. “You know they won’t let us die--I’ll have to watch you suffer for a very, very long time. It would be--quite literally the only succor left in the world--if I knew that you were somewhere else. And safe.”   
  
“ _Tough_ ,” Martin says, like he has a thousand times before. More spiders hurl themselves against the fire of Jon’s Gaze; the room grows cloudier with veils of web.   
  
“There’s another Jonathan Sims there,” Jon makes himself say. His throat tries to close up as he says it. “He’s lonely. He’s never met you.”   
  
There’s a ragged inhale of breath beside him. “I don’t care,” Martin says, and then there’s a hot tight mouth pressed to Jon’s jaw, less a kiss than a hard nudge. “I don’t care about him, he’s not you.”   
  
“He _is_ me,” Jon says with a certainty he’s not sure he feels. He can’t spare the attention to reach out and Know it; he can’t hold out against the spiders much longer. There’s no more time. “He’s me. I’ll know you’re safe, and you’ll be with me.” 

“ _You’ll_ be alone,” Martin says, high and hurt. “I can’t leave you alone here.”   
  
“Martin,” Jon manages. “I am so sorry.” 

“Wait,” Martin begins, his eyes going wide, but whatever he’s going to say gets lost, because Jon deliberately tears his eyes away from the spiders and turns the full force of his Gaze on the man he loves. 

This is his last look: dark curls, freckles, beloved mouth twisted with horror. His jacket is green and his jeans are muddy and his hand around Jon’s is scabbed at the knuckles and his shirt is stained with old blood and older mustard and his forehead is creased with worry and his eyes are blue and terrified and _blue_ and Jon loves him past reason, past promises.   
  
“ _Go,_ ” Jon commands him, static crackling in his voice, and Martin--doesn’t have a choice. Spiders are flooding into the room, web ropes are flung around Jon’s wrists, his neck--but Martin steps into the light, and then he’s gone.   
  
The tiniest spiders skitter frantically after him, surging in a black tide towards the crack in reality. 

With the last bit of his strength, Jon closes the door.   
  


*

Jon has been having bad dreams.   
  
He never used to remember his dreams, but for the last month strange and vivid scenes have been plaguing him as soon as he closes his eyes. One night he walks through a yellow door and flees from a laughing, long-fingered woman; another night he finds himself in a raging forest fire, and when he drops down to crawl through the brush on hands and knees he finds the forest floor is covered in teeth. A spider with a woman’s face where its head should be wraps him up in a cocoon; a giant bodiless Eye tells him he’s done very well. Jon would think his psyche is regurgitating the plots of bad fantasy films, but he hasn’t consumed anything that could reasonably be called bad fantasy since Georgie split up with him.   
  
It doesn’t occur to him the dreams have anything to do with the weirdo at the sandwich shop.   
  
The weirdo at the sandwich shop has dimples and wears Doctor Who T-shirts; if he weren’t a weirdo he might look like the kind of person Jon typically finds himself befriended by. Nerdy and--touchable, with the kind of face that promises he means no harm.   
  
Jon gets a sandwich at the same shop every weekday, because it’s close to the library and means he has an excuse to change his location, which his therapist tells him is good for his attention span.   
  
For the last month there’s been someone else there, every time Jon’s gone in. Well, no, it’s Central London, there are always other people in the shop--but this someone is different. He’s sat in the same corner every time--the table Jon usually claims for himself, incidentally--and he pretends not to, but he watches Jon the whole time Jon’s in the shop, darting his gaze away whenever Jon looks back. Occasionally he scribbles something in a sketchbook, but always looks back up at Jon, like he’s making sure he’s still there. Like he’s _checking in on him_.   
  
Jon isn’t used to being watched. It’s like being followed by an MI6 agent who’s really shit at his job.

One month in, watcher in the corner still there, Jon decides to confront him. The watcher doesn’t look _creepy_ , at least, or physically imposing. Jon definitely thinks he could outrun him if he needed to. So he puts in his usual sandwich order and then marches up to the corner table.   
  
“Can I help you with something?” he demands. 

The watcher blinks up at him. His eyes are very blue, Jon notices.   
  
“Uh,” the watcher says. “What?” His voice is nice--light, higher than Jon would have guessed it would be.

“You’ve been watching me,” Jon says with a pointed look at the sketchbook. “So I thought I’d ask.”   
  
The watcher makes a strange noise, somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. “Right. Sorry.”   
  
“You don’t need to be sorry,” Jon says impatiently. “It’s not a crime. I just want to know why.”   
  
An incongruous smile flashes over the watcher’s face, there and then gone in an instant. “Well,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”   
  
Jon shifts.   
  
“You just,” the watcher pauses, and then smiles again, this time deliberately. It’s less sincere than the last one. “You look really familiar.” 

Jon frowns at him. He doesn’t look familiar to Jon, but that’s meaningless. Jon has a terrible memory for faces. “You didn’t go to Oxford, did you?”   
  
“Nope,” the watcher says. “Definitely not.”   
  
“King’s College?” he asks.   
  
“Nope,” the watcher says, popping the P this time. “Look, I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”   
  
“I’m not disturbed,” Jon says irritably. “What are you working on?”   
  
“What?”   
  
Jon indicates the open sketchbook. “You’re always looking at me and then writing something down.” 

The watcher winces and flips the sketchbook closed. “Just, ah--just some poetry.” 

“Oh,” Jon says, and wonders why he feels disappointed. He should be _relieved_ a stranger isn’t about to share his terrible poetry with him. “So this is your creative process, I suppose? Pick a stranger and stare at them until a poem falls out?”   
  
“No,” the watcher says. “I told you. You look familiar.” 

“Right,” Jon says dismissively, and hears his sandwich order being called. “Just one of those things.” With a half-shrug, he turns back to the counter.   
  
“--Hey,” the watcher says, standing up at the table. There’s an expression on his face Jon doesn’t know how to read. “Do you--would you like to grab a drink? Sometime?” 

Jon almost says no out of sheer force of habit, but something makes him hesitate. He doesn’t typically care about looks, and--he still doesn’t, but--his mind keeps catching on the man’s eyes, bright and blue. He wonders if the stranger doesn’t look familiar after all.   
  
“Here,” the watcher says, and quickly scrawls something down on a piece of sketchbook paper, which he rips out and offers to Jon. “Text me if you’d like, or throw it out. It’s up to you.”   
  
Jon accepts the scrap of paper, glancing down at it automatically. There’s a phone number, followed by a name. _Martin Blackwood. Sorry for staring_. 

Jon looks back up at the watcher--Martin Blackwood. Martin Blackwood doesn’t look nervous, or even flirtatious. He looks--  
  
Jon doesn’t know the word for it.   
  
“Thanks,” Jon says, stilted. “I’ll--do that.” He’s not sure if he means that he’ll text or that he’ll throw it away.   
  
“Bye, Jon,” Martin says very softly, and Jon doesn’t realize until he’s back at the library that he never gave Martin his name.   
  
*   
  
“Do not text the creep from the sandwich shop,” Georgie instructs him firmly over the phone. “In fact, start going to Pret-a-Manger!”   
  
“Too expensive,” Jon says. He’s decided Martin Blackwood only knew his name because they call it out whenever his order’s ready, and it’s not like he hasn’t been paying attention. “I think he’s harmless, anyway.”   
  
“It’s still weird,” Georgie says. “Unless--you like him?”   
  
She sounds doubtful.   
  
“I don’t _like_ him,” Jon says, and means it. “I don’t _know_ him.” 

He doesn’t text Martin Blackwood, but he does preserve the number in the pages of the book he’s been reading on the train, and every once in a while he flips to it and looks down at the name and the message there.   
  
He brings lunch from home for the next week, and on Sunday night he has the dream about the basement. 

He dreams he’s in an ordinary house, and that should be reassuring after the bizarre horrors his subconscious has stirred up in the last month, but the feeling in this house is--bad, even though it’s empty.   
  
Jon walks through the empty corridor and finds a door under the stairs. For a second the revealed space just looks like storage, but then Jon realizes there’s a second staircase leading down to a wide, dark basement.   
  
There’s a crack in the far wall. It is small, but white light spills out of it. As Jon watches, a single spider crawls through the crack, large and shiny and black.   
  
“I have to kill her,” someone says, and Jon turns to find Martin Blackwood standing next to him, holding his hand tightly.   
  
“You’re the only one who can,” Jon finds himself agreeing, but he isn’t sure where the words come from. “You and Basira.” 

Frowning, he turns back to the crack in the wall, but it’s closed up. The spider is nowhere to be seen.   
  
He tries to tell Martin Blackwood that the spider has gone missing--this is one of Jon’s least favorite things about spiders, how quickly they move, how easy it is to lose them if you take your eyes off them--but he still doesn’t seem to have command of his tongue. Instead one of Martin Blackwood’s large hands comes up to cup the back of his head, and Jon finds himself being kissed. It doesn’t feel strange, in the dream, just easy and right.   
  
“I miss you,” Martin says quietly into Jon’s mouth, and Jon’s chest aches without him really understanding why.   
  
“I’m glad you’re safe,” Jon’s mouth says without his consent.   
  
“Jon,” Martin says, tangling their hands together. “When I’m done, I’m coming back for you.”   
  
“You can’t,” Jon says again without wanting to, and Martin Blackwood kisses his knuckles. Jon didn’t know you could kiss someone stubbornly, but Martin is doing that.   
  
“Try and stop me,” Martin says, and that’s when Jon wakes up, and it’s two in the morning, and he’s alone in his bed.   
  
His mouth is still tingling, and his heart is pounding.   
  
It takes him a long time to fall back to sleep.


End file.
